Friday, February 9, 2018

Perhaps you’ve heard. Tacked onto the bill that averted
another government shutdown is a child welfare finance “reform” measure called
the Family First Prevention Services Act.

The bill was thought to be dead. It was killed last year by what
one reformer who transformed his own institution years ago called the group home
industry – the collection of private agencies typically paid for every day
they hold foster children in the
worst form of care, group homes and institutions -- and their public sector
allies.

But it came back to life as part of the process of keeping
the government open. Now
it’s law.

One might expect advocates of family preservation to celebrate,
and some almost certainly will. The bill allows some federal money once
restricted to funding foster care to be used for better alternatives. And, in theory, it curbs federal funding for
group homes and institutions.

Some very good child welfare reformers favor the bill. The
best case for it was made by one of those reformers, Jeremy Kohomban. He
transformed what was once one of the nation’s most regressive residential
treatment centers, Children’s Village, in New York, into a leader in
emphasizing trying to help children in their own homes or foster homes. Here’s
his case for the bill.

Setting up prevention
to fail

But I disagree. In
2016, I wrote that the range of prevention services that could be funded
under Family Frist was tiny, and there were absurd restrictions on which
programs within that range could get federal aid. And instead of limiting group
homes and institutions, I argued that the bill was so weak that it actually
strengthened them, creating a whole category of institution that would be, in
effect, sanctified in federal law.

So it’s no wonder that in 2016, the Congressional Budget
Office estimated that only $130 million in additional federal funds would go to
prevention each year – a drop in the bucket compared to the billions spent on
foster care. CBO also estimated that the proportion of foster children in group
homes and institutions would barely change – declining from 14 percent to 11
percent – over ten years.

So what the bill really does is set prevention up to fail. When these minor changes don’t do much to
curb needless foster care, those wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach
will say See? Changing financial incentives didn’t work, all those children
must really need to be in foster care. In
fact, all those kids will still be in foster care because there was almost no
real change in financial incentives.

A “presents for pimps”
loophole

Nevertheless, the group home industry insisted that even the
slightest restriction on their ability to warehouse children in the very worst
form of “care” was more than they could handle.

Desperate to get something passed, supporters caved on issue
after issue:

●
They weakened a provision requiring institutions that supposedly engage in
residential treatment to have actual clinical staff on site.

The new law

In one respect, the version that just became law may be a
little better: although the types of prevention that can be funded are as
limited as ever, the standards for specific programs don’t seem to be as
onerous.

But in at least one key respect, possibly two, the version
that just became law is even worse.

●
There’s a provision (Section 2661) allowing funds from a much smaller existing “family
support services” program to be diverted to “supporting and retaining foster
families for children.” (I’m not sure if this is new, or if I’d simply
overlooked it in previous versions.)

●
States can delay the minor restrictions on funds for group homes and
institutions for two years (though if they did that, they’d also have to forego
the limited new prevention funding). In
fact, this is closer to a four-year delay.
The bill’s provisions concerning group homes don’t take effect until
October 1, 2019 – states opting to delay would not be affected until October 1,
2021.

This gives the group home industry lots and lots of time to
weaken the law still further.

Ten years ago, such
restrictions on congregate care would have occurred as foster care numbers were
ticking down across the country. Today, states will have to find more foster
home capacity while some accommodate rapidly rising numbers of kids.

The second sentence is untrue. There is another alternative:
Stop taking so many kids needlessly. But, as I’ve noted before, the Fox News of
Child Welfare always frames any effort to curb the use of congregate care in
terms of group homes vs. foster homes; family preservation is left off the
table.

And that story comes on top of another
story devoted entirely to California groups whining about the law.

Goldilocks is wrong

And finally, as
I wrote last year: Please, spare us all the Goldilocks defense; the one
that goes, if some people think the law is too tough and other people think
it’s not tough enough, it must be juuuuuuuuust right.

No. The fact that some in the group home industry have the
gall to claim this law is too tough just shows how spoiled they’ve gotten after
all those years getting to eat all the porridge.

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

A new audit of Oregon’s
child welfare system is an exercise in willful ignorance. That makes it more
part of the problem than part of the solution.

Earlier this week, Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Louddevoted
a program to a new (and, as almost every headline noted, “scathing”) audit of the
state child welfare system, conducted by the Oregon Secretary of State’s
office. The producers invited me onto the program to respond to comments from the
state’s two top child welfare officials and the lead auditor.

I was in a studio near Washington, D.C., so I couldn’t see
the other guests. That’s why I’ll probably never know how they managed to fit
all those guests and an elephant into one studio in Portland.

The elephant in the studio is, of course, Oregon’s obscenely
high rates of tearing children from their families and trapping them in foster
care. That elephant has been hanging around for decades – Oregon has been
tearing apart families at rates far above the national average since at least
the mid-1980s. Through all that time, the elephant has been ignored by the state
Department of Human Services. And the
behavior of the auditors is, if anything, even worse.

The audit devotes exactly one sentence to the fact that
Oregon is such an outlier when it comes to tearing apart families. The lead auditor gave it a single sentence on
Think Out Loud – and the sentence was
shocking. She said she didn’t know if Oregon holding children in foster care at
a rate she described as double the national average made the Oregon system “worse
or better” than others.

In fact, it’s not quite that bad. Oregon actually holds
children in foster care at a rate about 60 percent above thenational average, not double. But the fact that the auditor thinks the rate is double and still doesn’t know whether that makes
Oregon better or worse is that much more appalling.

As I said during my segment on the program. which starts at
32 minutes in and can be heard here …

… it’s understandable that someone entirely new to child welfare
issues would not know, at the very start of the audit, if an insane rate of removal is “better or
worse.” But how can you go through months and months examining an agency and
still not know by the end of the process?
Did the audit team even ask why Oregon is such an outlier? Apparently not.

Not that you asked, but
…

Though the auditors didn’t ask, here’s why
a high rate of removal makes a child welfare system worse:

● Most cases are nothing
like the horror stories. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” Other
cases fall between the extremes. Massive
studies of typical cases show that children left in their own homes fare
better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster
care. And a
study of foster children in Oregon and Washington State showed that the
foster care system churns out walking wounded four times out of five.

● All that harm occurs
even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But study
after study, including two from Oregon, found abuse in one-quarter to
one-third of foster homes. The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is
even worse.

Oregon,
in particular, has seen scandal after scandal over abuse in foster care. Indeed, on the very day those child welfare
officials, the auditor and the elephant piled into that studio, it
was revealed that DHS proposed deliberately allowing children to remain in
homes where caseworkers admit they think the children are not safe – in order
to settle a lawsuit seeking to bar the state from warehousing children in
hotels. (It’s another example of how efforts to fix Oregon foster care have
become a
pathetic game of whack-a-mole.)

● All the time money and
effort wasted on false allegations, cases in which family poverty is confused
with neglect and needless foster care, as in this
Oregon case and this
one, is, in effect, stolen from finding children in real danger who really
do need to be taken from their homes.

So the implicit assumption behind the auditor’s ignorance –
what she really was saying is: Maybe that high rate of removal makes children
safer – is false. In all those months, the audit team never checked to find
out.

That makes the entire audit an exercise in willful
ignorance. And it invalidates many of its conclusions.

Much of the audit is built around the premise that there is
a shortage of foster homes in Oregon.
But if you don’t know why Oregon is taking away so many children, you
don’t know if Oregon has too few foster parents, or too many foster children.

So we get page after page about recruiting more foster
parents. Worse, the audit calls for institutionalizing more children in so-called “residential
treatment” – accepting as fact the claims of the residential treatment industry
that this is the only option for children with serious behavioral problems.

Apparently in all those months of auditing the auditors
never reviewed the mass
of research showing that residential treatment is a failure and there is
nothing residential treatment does that can’t be done better with Wraparound programs.
Such programs bring all the help a child needs into her or his own home or a
foster home. To see how, perhaps the
audit team will have a look at this video:

Similarly, the audit refers to DHS resorting to the very worst
form of “care” opening up more parking place “shelters” as “potentially positive
steps…” They express no concern at all that shelters
are terrible for children. The qualifier “potentially” refers only to the
fact that the shelter might not be enough to deal with the so-called “shortage”
of foster parents.

A gratuitous swipe at
kinship care

The audit even takes a gratuitous swipe at the least harmful
form of foster care – kinship foster care, placing children with relatives
instead of strangers. Study
after study
after study
has found that kinship foster care is more stable, more humane and, most
important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.” Yet the
audit declares that many foster children “have acute mental and physical health
needs that career foster homes may be better equipped and specifically trained
to handle.”

Why? Do the auditors think relatives are inherently too
stupid to be properly “equipped” and “trained”?

And speaking of biases, just as only one sentence is devoted
to Oregon’s high rate of tearing apart families, less than a sentence is
devoted to the racial makeup of Oregon foster care. The audit notes that
one-third of Oregon foster children are nonwhite. But that is mentioned only in
the context of – as you’ve probably guessed by now -- the need to recruit more
foster parents of color. The possibility that Oregon’s high rate of removal
might be related
to racial bias is not even considered.

Even when the auditors are right, they fail to ask the
obvious questions.

●The
audit paints a picture of an agency so incompetent it can’t even produce an up-to-date
organizational chart. It also confirms
something some of us have long known: Oregon is where good ideas in child
welfare go to die.

●The
audit discusses how badly DHS sometimes treats foster parents, and even how
badly people in the agency sometimes treat each other. But it never asks the
obvious question: DHS really needs foster parents, and it really needs its own
employees. If this is how staff and foster parents are treated, how are they
treating birth parents?

But since the list of “stakeholders” the auditors spoke to
includes virtually everyone with any connection to the system except birth parents who lost their
children to that system, it’s not likely the auditors would think to ask that
question.

Given all that, it’s not surprising that the recommendations
amount to nothing but more of the same: Recruit lots more foster parents and hire
lots more caseworkers.

But we already know exactly what that will produce: The same
lousy system only bigger.

That won’t start to change until, at long last, someone in
Oregon says “Hey: There’s an elephant in the room!”

Monday, February 5, 2018

In January, 2003, just four days after taking office, in the
wake of the disclosure of a high-profile child abuse tragedy, the governor of
Arizona, Janet Napolitano, gave a speech in which she told child protective
services caseworkers to just take away the kids “and we’ll sort it out later.”

Napolitano’s remarks helped kick-start what would become the
nation’s longest foster-care panic. The number of children taken from their
parents skyrocketed, increasing year after year after year all the way through
2015. Even with a slight decline in 2016, Arizona took away children at a rate
more than 50 percent above the national average.

For some of that time, the panic was encouraged by the
state’s largest newspaper, the Republic.
But last year that changed.

The Republic
received a three-year grant to fund in-depth reporting on child welfare.
Editors brought back to the Republic
an outstanding investigative reporter, Bob Ortega. He was tasked with, in effect, leading the Republic to take a bold, new look at
child welfare, a look that would question everyone’s assumptions, including the
newspaper’s own. That led to superb stories such
as this one. And
this one.

Though the project continues, there’s been a setback.
Unfortunately for Arizona, Ortega left the Republic
to join the investigative unit at CNN.

The latest story

This latest story, about promises by the Arizona Department
of Child Safety (DCS) to do more to keep families together, still has a lot to
commend it. The story focuses on a mother struggling with drug abuse. But instead of the usual horror story, this
case is far closer to the norm – a mother who dearly loves her child and is
winning her battle with addition. In
addition, a lot of space is devoted to trying to explain the emotional harm
done to children by needless foster care.

But, at the same time, one can almost feel some of the old Republic assumptions sneaking back into
the coverage.

The story resurrects some myths that have plagued child
welfare systems and child welfare news coverage for decades.

● The myth that child
removal equals child safety. As noted above, the story acknowledges theemotional harm of needless removal – and
doesn’t just brush it off in a paragraph.
But it still implies that if you take away the child at least the child
will be physically safe.

Like so many stories before, this one implies, wrongly, that
child safety and family preservation are opposites that need to be balanced.
Leaving the child at home is constantly described in terms of risk – even if
the story suggests the risk might be worth it.

But study
after study shows high rates of abuse in foster care itself. Indeed, one of
Ortega’s stories examined this very point. He
wrote:

In 2014, of 46 states
that reported data to the federal Children's Bureau, all claimed that fewer
than 2 percent of children in foster care had been harmed in the prior year.
Arizona said that barely a tenth of 1 percent of children in care were verifiably
harmed.

But in surveys going
back for decades, from 25 percent to as high as 40 percent of former foster
children report having been abused or neglected in care.

For the overwhelming majority of children family
preservation is the safer option. It is
foster care that is riskier – in
every respect.

Consequences of
needless foster care

And discussions of emotional harm that largely lack
specifics about outcomes don’t tell the full story of that harm.

Since the mother at the center of the Republic story is recovering from drug addiction, it would seem
particularly important to explain why helping her recover without placing her
newborn in foster care is better for the child.

But there is no reference to research such as a the landmak study of two groups of children born with cocaine in
their systems, One group was placed in
foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them. After six months, the babies were tested
using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up,
reaching out. Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did
better. For the foster children, the
separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

And, of course, there are those two massive studies of more than 15,000
typical cases, which show that children left in their own homes fared better in
later life even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.

So from the point of view of child safety in all its forms, Arizona’s stated new
approach – which emphasizes working harder to find ways to keep children safe
without resorting to foster care -- makes sense.

● The myth of the
ever-swinging pendulum. What is it
with journalists and pendulums, anyway?

Even when I was a reporter, I never understood the fondness
of my fellow journalists for thinking of just about everything in terms of a
swinging pendulum. The Republic story is no exception. It keeps
coming back to whether the pendulum is swinging and how to set that pendulum in
just the right spot. Editors love those pendulums, too. The metaphor makes it into a subhead and a
pullquote.

The problem with the metaphor is illustrated by how it’s
used in the story itself. The story notes a recent drop in the number of children
in foster care in Arizona and promptly invokes the pendulum. But even with that
decline, Arizona still holds children in foster care at a rate more than 30
percent above the national average.
In child welfare, the pendulum generally swings only from taking away too many
children to taking away far too many children. (I think I’ll make that one of my pullquotes.)

● Setting the reforms up
for scapegoating. The story tells us that

since the new practice
started late last summer, there have been child deaths and near-fatalities in
which [the State Department of Child Safety] was involved. It's unclear, at
this point, whether any of those cases involved a decision to leave a child at
home, or under the supervision of a “safety monitor.” Investigations are
ongoing.

In fact, even if it hasn’t happened yet there will be cases in which the new approach leads
to leaving a child at home and something horrible happens to that child.

But the same thing happened under the old “take the child
and run” approach, when caseworkers were so overwhelmed with children who
didn’t belong in foster care that they had no time to investigate any case
properly, and overlooked more children in real danger. And, of course, it
happened every time a child was needlessly removed only to be abused in foster
care.

But that won’t stop those wedded to the
take-the-child-and-run approach from exploiting the tragedy, whenever it occurs
and whatever the circumstances, to try to sabotage this first small effort to
curb Arizona’s 14-year foster care panic. As I’ve
noted before, opponents of safe, proven alternatives to foster care will
never give up their horror stories – because it’s all they’ve got.

There is no approach to child welfare that eliminates every
tragedy. If you judge a system by its
horror stories, all systems fail. The
question is which approach typically makes children safer – and on that the
evidence is overwhelming: You can’t have child safety without family preservation.For more about Arizona and its long, long foster-care panic, see our 2007 report on Arizona child welfare.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

A writer who was barred from blogging for an
education journal after writing a column widely viewed as racist now assures us
that there is no racism in child welfare – and predictive analytics will
correct the racism that isn’t there.

Don’t you feel better already?

An odious piece of
child welfare legislation known as the Adoption and Safe Families Act enshrined
a “take-the-child-and-run” mindset in federal law leading to an
increase in the number of children torn from their homes. It also increased
the number of children who “age out” of foster care with no home at all. The
former was intentional, the latter was merely predictable.

A few years after
ASFA became law one of those who claims responsibility for writing it, Richard
Gelles, couldn’t resist a little
gloating. Gelles is the former dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice
at the University of Pennsylvania. In an interview in 2000, he said:

Initially, this was just supposed to be a
safe families bill, not really an adoption bill at all. The adoption component was a way of sanitizing the bill, to make it
more appealing to a broader group of people. Adoption is a very popular concept
in the country right now. [Emphasis added.]

Of all those who
advocate for a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, Gelles is
probably the second most extreme – I’d give the edge for #1 to Elizabeth Bartholet, but it’s close. (For a brief critique of
Gelles, see this commentary
from his faculty colleague, (and NCCPR board member) Prof. Dorothy Roberts.)

So it is appropriate
that when right-wing writer Naomi Schaefer Riley needed a way to sanitize the
use of predictive analytics in child welfare for a crowd that might be
suspicious – libertarians – she turned to Gelles. Gelles was her primary source
in an article touting predictive analytics she wrote for the libertarian magazine Reason.

Predictive analytics
uses computer algorithms to tell government authorities things like which
alleged criminals should get bail, who to investigate as an alleged child
abuser and, if some of its strongest backers get their way, which children
should be taken from their parents and consigned to foster care.

The failure of
predictive analytics in child welfare is discussed brilliantly in this article from Wired, (an
excerpt from the new book Automating
Inequality), so I won’t
discuss that failure in detail again here.
Rather, I want to focus on how Riley tries to win over libertarians.

● She sandpapers
down the rough edges of her own take-the-child-and-run rhetoric, which can be
found in its raw form in columns for Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. For Reason,
she finds others to say the words with a bit more finesse – though in at least
one case, discussed blow, the result is laughable.

● She makes a little
room for those of us who dissent, quoting us in what opinion writers commonly
refer to as “to be sure” paragraphs (as in “To be sure, the side I don’t agree
with says … but of course they’re wrong because …”)

● She – and Gelles –
even try to sell us on the notion that they care about errors in all directions
and they really, truly want child
welfare systems to use predictive analytics because supposedly it will curb all
kinds of error. So Riley writes:

Every day some kids are forcibly taken from
their parents for the wrong reasons while others are left to suffer despite
copious warning signs.

Strangely, however,
I have been unable to find a Riley column in the Post about the former, but there is plenty about the latter.
Indeed, she is a master of the standard technique of the take-the-child-and-run
crowd – take horror stories and extrapolate.

Thus she writes that David Hansell, the current commissioner of New York City’s child
welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, “has to clean up
the mess left by his predecessor …” based on the fact that on that
predecessor’s watch children “known to the system” died. That also happened on the watch of every
other ACS commissioner - and every leader of every large child welfare system.
In fact, under the leadership of that predecessor Riley does not bother to name
– it was Gladys Carrion - child safety in New York City improved. It’s gotten worse, (or should I say messier?)
under Hansell.

Riley on race

Most disturbing, given
her desire to reassure us that there is no racial bias problem with the use of

predictive analytics, is Riley’s general take on racial issues.

Riley was barred from blogging for the Chronicle
of Higher Education after writing a column in 2012 calling for eliminating the entire
field of Black Studies – because she deemed three doctoral dissertations
“left-wing victimization claptrap.” As others pointed out, that conclusion, is based only on the
titles and summaries run in a Chronicle news
story.

With that as the
basis, Riley wrote:

… the entirety of black studies today seems
to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the
past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black
president!

… If these young scholars are the future of
the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and
let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in
America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.

Of course Riley
wrote that in 2012. She couldn’t have known who would be the next president,
and about the racial hatred he would unleash and continues to encourage. But in 2017, she was still singing from the
racism-is-so-over hymnbook. In a column called “How liberals are killing the NAACP” she writes:

African-Americans have full legal rights.
Hate crimes are anomalies. Black people are running corporations, universities
and until recently the White House.

So it should come as
no surprise that Riley is a member of what I call child welfare’s “caucus of
denial” – the group that believes child welfare is magically exempt from the
racial bias that permeates every other aspect of American life. But unlike the
liberals in this caucus, who tend to limit the denial to child welfare, Riley
goes further, writing:

Just as we cite statistics about
incarceration and police intervention without actually asking who is committing
crimes, so we blame ACS for getting involved in the lives of too many black and
Hispanic children without asking why that might be.

Riley’s “denial”
comes in a column trashing the New York Times
story about foster care as the new “Jane Crow” – a story that also explains “why that might
be,” citing exactly the sorts of cases of needless removal which, in her Reason article, Riley claims to be
concerned about. In the Post Riley sneers at the Times story in her lead:

Everyone’s a little bit racist, even the
employees of the Administration for Children’s Services. At least that’s what The New York Times would like us to believe.

In her Reason article, Riley offers up the same
message about the Times story,
without slathering it in snide. Instead, she quotes Bill Baccaglini, president
of The New York Foundling one of the
private child welfare agencies paid by the city to provide foster care.

Some of my best friends are …

First, Riley and
Baccaglini fall back on the 21st Century equivalent of the 1960s
“some of my best friends are …” line: The system can’t be racist (at least not
in New York City), they say, because most of the caseworkers are nonwhite. This
ignores the way institutional racism works and it ignores intra-ethnic
prejudice, the sad fact that within
almost every racial and ethnic group there are biases.

In New York City caseworkers often are also women of color;
they may come from a slightly different class background. So one of the lessons
of this is that these racial biases are not overtly about white people being
overtly prejudiced and seeking to control these families. It’s more that we
just have these assumptions that are often unconscious. [These are] unconscious
biases in our general culture that you don’t escape even if you are a woman of
color working as a caseworker.

And then it gets
really weird. Baccaglini cites the following as evidence that there is no
racial bias in New York City child welfare:

You couldn’t even consider race a variable.
It’s a constant. All of the kids who
come into this system, unfortunately, are nonwhite.

Wait. You mean this
is how we’re supposed to know the system is NOT racist?

Baccaglini then
offers up the standard party line of the denial caucus:

The racial discriminatory aspects of the
system happened well before [child protective services involvement] with our
opportunity structure … The fact that the mom in the South Bronx cannot get
decent medical care; the fact that the mom in the South Bronx cannot get a good
job; the fact that the mom was put into an [individualized educational program]
and never got a degree and then had a child.

In other words,
Baccaglini is telling us, there used to be racism in America and that made
Black people bad parents! (The real
story of how child welfare treats families in the South Bronx can
be found here.)

The idea that the
solution here might be helping the mom with job training, health care and
education apparently is not on the table.

A poor understanding of poverty

And that leads to
another problem with Riley’s attempt to lure libertarians into a love of big
government: misstating the relationship between poverty and the child welfare
system.

Adopting a voice of
reason tone for Reason that differs
from her Post persona, Riley tells us:

There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem
here. Poverty is highly correlated with abuse. There are a variety of reasons
for that, which can be difficult to untangle. Poverty causes stress in
marriages and other relationships, and sometimes that stress is taken out on
kids.

But that’s only a
small part of the story. Yes, of course poverty exacerbates stress and that can
lead to more actual abuse. But Riley ignores the larger issue, the
confusion of poverty itself with neglect, thanks to broad, vague laws that often define neglect as lack of
adequate food clothing or shelter.

Once again, she is
more direct in the Post, where she
can appeal directly to her right-wing base. There, she offers a critique of
social work education similar to her assessment of Black Studies – but this
time she relies on course catalogues instead of dissertation summaries.

She finds it deeply
disturbing that one school of social work offers a course exploring “poverty in
the context of oppression, diversity and social justice” and another has one
that helps students “challenge bias, prejudice and forms of discrimination…”
This supposedly proves that social work education often is “boxed in by
political correctness in an industry where that can be deadly.”

Given all this, it’s
no surprise that in Reason she echoes
the argument of the white middle-class foster parent who extolled predictive
analytics in child welfare in an article for The New York Times Magazine: There is no racial bias in child welfare – and predictive analytics
will fix the bias that already doesn’t exist!

Whitewashing failure in Los Angeles

Like the Times Magazine writer, Riley also has a
problem dealing with the failure of the first predictive analytics experiment in
Los Angeles, known as AURA. The Times
Magazine story solved the problem by ignoring it altogether. Riley takes a more confusing approach. She
touts its alleged success, but then notes that

Perhaps because they
realize how sensitive the program is, and how much relying on the wrong model
could have undermined public confidence, they are self-reflective and critical
in a way you might not expect from government bureaucrats.

Yes. That must be
it. It can’t possibly be because the
experiment had a false positive rate of 95 percent – that is, 95 percent of the time, when the
model predicted something terrible would happen to a child, it didn’t. Riley never mentions this in her story.

So add Naomi
Schaefer Riley to the long list of take-the-child-and-run advocates who are
pushing predictive analytics. There’s also Gelles, and Bartholet, and Daniel
Heimpel, publisher of the Chronicle of
Social Change, the Fox News of Child Welfare and a staunch member of the “denial caucus”
who has run one puff piece after another touting it.

And almost all of
them now are trying to persuade us that, really, truly, predictive analytics
will curb the needless intrusion into the lives of Americans and the wrongful
removal of children, something none of them has shown any indication of caring
much about before. It reminds me of how
congressional Republicans suddenly embraced the Children’s Health Insurance
Program, when they thought it would help them score political points during the
debate over the recent government shutdown.

There is nothing
libertarian about predictive analytics in child welfare. It’s just big
government conservatism.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

The recent revelations about horrific abuse of 13 children
and young adults in California have prompted a spate of commentary suggesting
that all homeschoolers effectively be treated as suspected child abusers. It's another example of why horror stories
make horrible law.

From NCCPR's column in Youth Today:

The real reason cracking down on home-schoolers has such
appeal, particularly for some of my fellow liberals, is because, well, “we” all
know what “they” are like. Although all sorts of people choose home-schooling
for all sorts of reasons, “home-schooler” immediately conjures up an image of
right-wing fundamentalists.

So try this. Whenever you read a proposal for compulsory
inspections of the children of home-schoolers, try substituting the word
“terrorism” for child abuse and “Muslim” for “home-schooler.” Then see if the
idea is still so appealing.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Given a chance to replicate a model family
defense program with a proven track record for reducing needless foster care,
improving child safety and saving taxpayers money – at no cost to the county –
metropolitan Rochester said no.

In the 1980s, when I was a reporter in Rochester, N.Y., the Chamber of Commerce used this slogan. I've updated it slightly to reflect current reality.

KEY POINTS

● More than a decade ago,
New York City pioneered a model of family defense in child welfare cases.
Impoverished families got a defense team including a social worker and a parent
advocate as well as an attorney with a reasonable caseload.

● In the years since, foster
care was curtailed, so children were spared enormous needless trauma from
wrongful removal and from being moved from foster home to foster home. They
also were spared from the high risk of abuse in
foster care itself. At the
same time, child safety improved. The model was so successful that the city child
protective services agency supported it, and the city repeatedly expanded it.

● A similar program in
Washington State has earned similar support from “all sides” and achieved
similar results.

● So when New York State
offered grants to Upstate counties interested in replicating the New York City
model, the Monroe County (metropolitan Rochester) Office of Public Defender applied. All of the county’s family court
judges supported the application.

● The county won the grant.
But then, county officials stepped in and refused to accept the money. In other
words, they turned down a chance to help the county’s children with a proven
approach – at no cost to the county.

● As one family court judge
pointed out, the plan would have done no more than give poor people the same
access to justice that the rest of us already have in these cases. But for the
Monroe County child protective services agency, that was too much to bear.

In some states,
there is no right to a public defender at all.
And in most states, family defense consists of a grossly overworked
public defender or private attorney on a shoestring contract who just met his
client outside the courtroom five minutes before the first court hearing – a
hearing that often takes place after the child already is in foster care. (That’s because, contrary to what they so
often claim, child protective services agencies and/or law enforcement can take
away children on their own authority – and
they often do.)

Naturally, most
child protective services agencies like it that way. The judge is reduced to
wielding a rubber-stamp instead of a gavel; the agency itself becomes the real
judge, jury and family executioner. The
agency can make little case or no case, offer no real help to families, and
stumble and bumble along as it pleases.

But, as with so many
times these agencies take a swing at so-called “bad parents” – the blow lands
on the children.

The lack of meaningful
defense is one of the main reasons so many children are taken needlessly from
everyone they know and love, often when family poverty
is confused with “neglect,” and consigned to the chaos of foster care. That helps explain why two
massive studies found that, in typical cases, children left in their own
homes fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster
care. Other studies document the high
rate of abuse
in foster care itself.

So consider the
paradox: Child protective services agencies routinely claim – again, falsely --
that “we don’t take away children – a judge has to approve everything we do.” But those same agencies are terrified of
anything that would actually let those judges hear all sides of the story and
make a fully-informed decision.

Indeed, the extent
to which a child protective services agency objects to letting judges actually hear
all sides of the story – that is, the extent to which it fights meaningful
family defense – is a good measure of just how arrogant that agency is and how
much it wants to avoid accountability. And that brings us to the child
protective services agency in Rochester, New York and surrounding Monroe County.

As it happens, Rochester
is where I did some of my first stories about the overreach of child protective
services and the harm that does to children when I was a reporter for WXXI-TV,
the public television station, and City
Newspaper, the alternative weekly. That was about 30 years ago.

A story last week in
a regional newspaper for the legal community, The
Daily Record,suggests things have not changed much.

The Record reports that, when offered a chance to replicate a proven model for
high-quality family defense – a model shown to improve outcomes for children
and save money, a model already in use for well over a decade elsewhere -- with
the tab picked up by New York State – the county turned it down.

A little later, I’ll
get to the excuses the county offered up for turning down this help (of which
my favorite is the claim, which I must admit is true, that attorneys for
parents would, in fact, represent parents).
But cutting through the b.s., what the county really is saying is this:

If poor people ever
got the same quality of defense the middle class can buy for itself and if
those poor people were able to challenge our lousy decisions, poor casework and
meaningless cookie-cutter service plans we’d have to up our game. We’d have to stop
taking away so many children needlessly, and provide real help to families.

The New York City experiment

This story really
begins in New York City in 2000. An
advisory panel formed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation as part of a
class-action lawsuit settlement sat in on Family Court hearings. As they documented in a scathing report, they
were appalled. They saw families railroaded, needless placements and judges so
terrified of the city’s tabloid press that they admitted, out loud and on the
record, that they rubber-stamped removals even when they felt the child
protective services agency, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS),
hadn’t made a good enough case.

A member of that
panel, John Mattingly, got the Casey Foundation to fund an experimental program
in which the newly-formed Center for Family
Representation (CFR) would provide high- quality defense counsel for a
small number of families.

In addition to a lawyer with a reasonable caseload,
each family would be assigned a social worker who could work with the family
and craft alternatives to those cookie-cutter “service plans” churned out by
ACS. Often there would be a third member
of the team, a parent advocate, someone who had been through the system herself
or himself, and could guide and encourage the parents.

At first there was
only CFR handling a limited number of cases in Manhattan. But after CFR proved
itself and Mattingly became commissioner of ACS,* the city itself began funding
parental defense. Today, CFR and three
other providers, the
Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services
and Neighborhood
Defender Services of Harlem provide this kind of defense counsel to about 90
percent of the impoverished families dealing with ACS in four of the city’s
five boroughs.

Those who cling to
stereotypes about everyone who loses a child to the system, believing them all
to be sadistic brutes who torture children would, of course, find this
upsetting. Those who know who really is in the system understand why this
approach is so good for children.

In 2011, Brooklyn
Defender Services produced this video about their work:

Brooklyn Defender
Services also represented some of the families profiled in the landmark
New York Times story about foster
care as the new Jane Crow.

Among the most
important reasons for this success: Often these teams can get in early, instead of after
the child already is in foster care, and much damage has been done.

As should be clear
by now, this is not a matter of “getting bad parents off.” The early intervention allows the defense
team to prove families innocent when they have, in fact, done nothing
wrong. (Yes, I said prove families
innocent. In the real world of child welfare, the burden of proof is reversed.)
The team can craft safe alternatives
when there is a problem but foster care isn’t necessary, and come up with
better ways to safety reunify families when it is.

It’s needed because,
as the New York State Office of Indigent Legal Services put it:

Unfortunately, experience has shown that
agencies too often wield their emergency removal power in situations where such
drastic state action is unnecessary, and without first attempting to address
the issues that brought the family to the agency’s attention.

High-quality family
defense is one of the reasons that, even
with setbacks over the past year, New York City has a relatively low rate
of child removal – and, during the years since this model expanded citywide and
entries into foster care declined, key
measures of child safety improved.

Even the state
Attorney General at the time, who had to face the better-prepared lawyers, supported the project
and wanted it expanded.

A
2011 evaluation found that in counties that have this kind of
representation children are reunified more
quickly. And when reunification really isn’t possible, guardianship and adoption occur more
quickly as well.

But Monroe County says no

So when New York
State’s Office of Indigent Legal Services offered a competitive grant to Upstate
counties to test the model, Monroe County’s Office of Public Defender, which
has a long and distinguished history in the field of family defense, applied.

Monroe County
certainly needs it. Though the county has made real progress in reducing needless
foster care, in 2016, the last year for which comparative data are available,
Monroe County still took away children at a rate more than 20 percent higher
than New York City, when entries into care are compared to the number of impoverished children in both places. For
reasons discussed below, the Monroe County record probably was worse in 2017. And,
as the Times story documented so
well, there remains plenty of needless removal in New York City.

Monroe County won
the grant. Everything was all set to go.

Until county
officials stepped in and turned down the money.
It’s not clear exactly who made the decision, but it appears to have
been the County Executive, Cheryl Dinolfo. Presumably she was acting on advice
from the county child protective services agency.

But she was acting against the advice of all of the county’s
family court judges. Judge Joan Kohout
called the initiative “a great idea” adding: “I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t
accept this grant, frankly.”

But I can. One possibility: There was a high-profile
death of a child “known to the system” last year, and the child protective
services agency has been under intense pressure as a result. Dinolfo may be
afraid of doing anything that political opponents could portray as “soft on
child abusers.” (In fact, such deaths typically set-off foster-care
panics, sharp sudden spikes in needless removal of children. So improved
family defense actually is needed more now than at any time in recent years.)

An aversion to accountability

But I think the
reasons go deeper – to the typical child welfare agency aversion to any kind of
accountability.

What we do know is
that the official reasons offered up by the county are pathetic excuses, an attempt to
conjure up false images of vicious technicality-wielding lawyers scaring
innocent children and hiding the crimes of child abusers.

The
Daily Record quotes a statement from county spokesman
Jesse Sleezer, in which he claims that the program

would have injected lawyers into cases of abuse
and neglect much earlier, potentially intimidating child victims and limiting
access by CPS workers who would otherwise assess and monitor the child’s
safety.

Well, for starters, as
noted above, they’ve been doing this in New York City since 2002, that hasn’t
happened, and the city child welfare agency is so comfortable with the program
that it keeps expanding it.

Monroe County ExecutiveCheryl Dinolfo

And throughout the
modern history of child welfare, from the notorious McMartin
Preschool case and others like it, all the way to the last major case to make
it to the U.S. Supreme Court (in which my organization’s volunteer vice president
served as pro bono counsel for the
family) those most prone to intimidate children have been caseworkers, law enforcement
and “therapists” – when the children didn’t give the answers they wanted to hear.

But even were this
the first program of its kind, and even had been no track record of success
elsewhere, Sleezer’s claim would be false on its face.

As Judge Kohout points
out, these lawyers would have no magical powers. It would just put the poor on something
closer to an equal footing with people of more means. Said Judge Kohout: “This program would provide the
same right and the same access to legal advice to poor parents.”

And that raises a
more fundamental issue: If the child protective services agency is “gaining
access” in ways that would be stopped by a lawyer for a middle-class family,
then chances are what the agency is doing to poor families is, at a minimum
unethical and possibly illegal. So does
Monroe County Child Protective Services want to stop poor people from having
higher-quality family defense so it can break the law?

Judge Kohout also
understands the real reason why it’s a good idea to use this model early in a
case: “There would be great benefit in avoiding dragging people into court and
stigmatizing them by giving them that help up front.”

Mr. Sleezer’s other objection

Sleezer offered up
one other objection:

The attorneys involved in this pilot program
would serve only one client — the parent accused of abuse — and would not have
any professional responsibility to serve the best interests of the abused
child.

Aside from the fact
that the overwhelming majority of parents are not accused of abuse – the charge
is neglect – Sleezer is, in one sense, right.
Attorneys appointed to represent parents do, in fact, represent parents.
You know; sort of like the way, in criminal cases, defense attorneys don’t also work
for the prosecution and prosecutors don’t also represent the accused.

And it is arrogant
in the extreme to assume that the interests of parents and children are at odds
from the get-go. In fact, that’s part of what judges are there to determine. What parents’ lawyers really are doing is
defending families. In the process, they defend children from all the harm of
needless foster care.

Determining whether the course of action recommended by those family defenders, or that recommended by lawyers representing any other party, should be followed is what we have judges for.

The only a chance a
judge really has to sort through competing claims and figure out what’s really best is if all sides get a chance
to make the best possible case for their position. Perhaps that’s why,
as noted above, all of Monroe County’s family court judges supported the grant
application.

I believe the
technical term for this approach, in which all sides make their best case and a
judge issues a ruling, is “justice.”

Apparently, that’s
exactly what Mr. Sleezer and his bosses are afraid of.

*Yes, that is the same John Mattingly I often
criticized on this blog when he ran ACS. But whatever his failings, he deserves
enormous credit for helping to create and expand high-quality family defense.

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

In a
previous post to this blog, I wrote about a New York Times story that described how police swarmed a middle
school and conducted highly-intrusive searches of hundreds of students looking
for drugs. They found none. They also had no warrant or other authority to
conduct the search.

I noted that this prompted outrage on the Left, a successful
lawsuit, and even criminal charges. Yet similar behavior is routine, and often
countenanced by self-proclaimed liberals, as long as it’s done by child
protective services workers in the name of fighting child abuse.

The Times provided
still another chance to examine double standards last month. This time it came
in the form of a deeply-moving
op-ed column by Tamar Manasseh, founder and president of Mothers Against
Senseless Killings.

She writes about her son.
Though he has never been in trouble with the law, Manasseh writes …

He and I constantly
fear that one day the Chicago Police Department is going to put him in its gang
database, which contains names of 130,000 people suspected of being gang
members. If they put your name in it, they aren’t required to notify you. And
then if you get stopped by a police officer, there’s a good chance you’re going
to end up in jail because it’s so easy for the police to come up with a reason
to arrest you. Being in the database can even make it hard to get jobs or
professional licenses because employers might find out when they run background
checks.

Chicago’s gang
database … sweeps in young people who are “likely offenders.” In reality,
anyone can get on the list, and for reasons like dressing a certain way, having
tattoos or just sitting on their porch at the wrong moment. It’s depressing but
unsurprising that more than 90 percent of people in the database are black or
Latino, a majority of whom have never been arrested for a violent offense or
for a drug or weapons charge.

Once again, there was a lot of sympathy in the comments
section, and, I’m sure plenty of concern among my fellow liberals.

The other database of rumor and innuendo

But once again, many liberals are silent – or worse – when
it comes to another kind of massive database of rumor and innuendo that also
harms children and families: “central registries” of alleged child abusers.

As with that database maintained by the Chicago police, it’s
a whole lot easier to be put into one of these registries than to fight your
way out. No actual conviction is
required. In most states there is no hearing of any kind beforehand. The family gets no opportunity to defend
itself at all. Typically a caseworker
need simply decide in her or his own mind that it is slightly more likely than
not that the accused is a child abuser, and the accused is in the database for
years, maybe decades, maybe forever. (In some states they are listed even when
the caseworker thinks there is more evidence of innocence.)

And let’s be clear about what is meant by “child abuser.” Given
the astounding breadth of laws defining abuse and, especially,
neglect, it’s easy to wind up in one of these databases just for being poor.

In some states, there is a long, cumbersome bureaucratic
appeals process, usually involving appealing to the same agency that put you in
the registry in the first place. In other states, there’s no way out at all.

So it’s no wonder that evidence from class-action lawsuits
indicates these registries are rife with error. In New York and Illinois
such lawsuits revealed that when people finally make it through the slow,
cumbersome appeals process they win 75 percent of the time. (NCCPR’s vice
president brought the New York suit.) In
North
Carolina and Missouri state supreme courts ruled that the very idea of
blacklisting someone first and forcing them to appeal afterwards was
unconstitutional. Those courts ruled there must be a hearing before a listing
in a central register.

And, as with the Chicago police registry, the victims of
this massive infringement on civil liberties often are children.

How child abuse
registries victimize children

For starters being listed on a central registry often means
you can’t get a job in any field dealing with children. So when an impoverished
parent is wrongly listed on the registry it further limits his or her job
prospects, increasing the chances that the family will have to endure all the
harm of poverty.

But the harm can be even more direct. The alleged perpetrator isn’t always an
adult. The lead

plaintiff in the Illinois lawsuit was listed when she was about
12-years-old – for sexual abuse – because she helped pull up the pants of much
younger children who were “playing doctor” in the family’s home day care.

Yet who was front and center a few years ago in demanding
that all these sloppy, slipshod databases be combined into a massive national
database of rumor and innuendo? None other than that great champion of
liberalism, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Judging by his quote in this
AP story, (which also has an excellent overview of all the problems with
central registries), Schumer did not even seem to realize that child abuse
registries are nothing like registries for sex offenders which require a
criminal conviction before anyone is listed.

Once again, however, hypocrisy is not a one-way street. I haven’t seen family values conservatives rushing
to demand curbs on the Chicago police gang database either.

Donate to NCCPR

IF A LINK TO AN NCCPR DOCUMENT IS BROEKN ...

Due to a change in our web hosting arrangements, we had to move a lot of the documents on our website, www.nccpr.org As a result, links to those documents in older Blog posts often won't work. When that happens, you can go to www.nccpr.org and do a search, or contact us at info(at)nccpr(dot)info and we'll send you the new link. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Follow by Email

About NCCPR

The members of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform have encountered the child welfare system in their professional capacities. Through NCCPR, we work to make that system better serve America’s most vulnerable children by trying to change policies concerning child abuse, foster care and family preservation. Unless otherwise noted, all posts on this blog are by NCCPR's Executive Director, Richard Wexler Contact us at info(at)nccpr(dot)info Postal address and phone:
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202)
Alexandria VA 22314
(703) 212-2006